GitHub Actions: built by you, run by us

Yesterday at GitHub Universe, we announced GitHub Actions, a new way to automate and customize your workflows. Configuring the apps and services that make up your development cycle takes significant time and effort. GitHub Actions applies open source principles to workflow automation, weaving together the tools you use from idea to production into one complete workflow. You can also create, share, and discover any actions your projects require, just as you would create, share, and discover code on GitHub.

As we prepared for Universe, we shared GitHub Actions with a group of customers, integrators, and open source maintainers to see what they could do. In just a few short weeks, talented teams and individuals alike have created hundreds of GitHub Actions. During today’s Universe keynote, we heard directly from developers, and we’re excited to share their work with you.

“We built Flic to let people enjoy the services they love in the simplest way possible: at the push of a button. GitHub is loved and used by millions of developers. We’re delighted to partner up with them, and let their community find their own creative ways to simplify their daily life with the endless possibilities of Flic.” – Elin Härén, Flic CEO

Flic opens up endless opportunities to get creative and simplify your daily life by controlling devices, apps, and services with the press of a button. Combined with GitHub Actions, Flic becomes a powerful (and fun) tool to customize and automate your workflow beyond command lines and keyboards. Use Flic to trigger specific actions or tasks within a GitHub repository—and turn your development workflow tactile.

Pulumi: A flexible, automated solution for continuous deployment

“The combination of GitHub Actions and Pulumi gives teams an easy, automated solution for the deployment of cloud applications and infrastructure to any cloud, purely using code and Git.” – Joe Duffy, Pulumi Co-founder and CEO

Pulumi’s open source SDK allows developers to write cloud applications and infrastructure in their programming language of choice. Combined with GitHub Actions, Pulumi offers total insight into deployment status and a flexible, automated solution for continuous deployment to any cloud—AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, or even on-premises—straight from GitHub.

With actions and Pulumi, teams can edit application or infrastructure-related files to trigger deployments, either by committing changes or merging pull requests—no manual steps or Bash scripting required. From here, you can preview, diff, and record deployments. And with Pulumi’s GitHub App, you can propose, approve, and promote code from staging to production using pull requests.

Netlify: Next-level integration and powerful new features

“Many of Netlify’s customers deploy sites and apps directly to our global Application Delivery Network from their GitHub repositories. The new functionality in GitHub Actions allows us to take that workflow to the next level, with much tighter integrations and more powerful features.” – Mathias Biilmann, Netlify CEO

Netlify allows you to build, deploy, and manage web projects. They provide a workflow that combines global deployment, continuous integration, and automatic HTTPS. Using GitHub Actions, Netlify provides tighter integration and more powerful features. If you have a monorepo with multiple sites, you can now use actions to trigger the deploy of only the sites that have changed.

“GitHub Actions made iterating on Terraform code in a pull request flow simple. It checked some really common mistakes, and it showed us the plan that would have happened. This makes collaborating with teammates on infrastructure changes intuitive and seamless.” – Mitchell Hashimoto, HashiCorp Founder and CTO

HashiCorp Terraform is an open source tool that enables developer to create, change, and improve infrastructure. It codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared among team members and treated as code: edited, reviewed, and versioned.

“This was faster than everything else I was doing, because I’m no longer running so many bots or sending to as many different services.” – Jessie Frazelle, Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft Azure

Jessie Frazelle is a developer advocate at Microsoft Azure and former maintainer of Docker. She has also contributed to Runc, Golang, Kubernetes, and the Linux kernel, to name some of her other work.

Before GitHub Actions, her open source workflow was complicated: tools pieced together and integrated with excessive orchestration. In order to work with all of the containers she needed, Jessie had to use an automation server to coordinate her release process. With GitHub Actions, Jessie was able to simplify and automate the entire development workflow right within GitHub.

“At Chewy, we use GitHub Business Cloud. We get all the benefits of GitHub.com, plus Enterprise integrations like SSO—and we don’t have to maintain the infrastructure ourselves. When we tried GitHub Actions, they just worked. They’re simple to create, set up, and configure. They have a low barrier to entry, and they’re built into GitHub. We were able to get up and running in less than a week.” – Peter Buckley, Manager of Software Automation at Chewy.com

Chewy.com is an online retailer of pet food and other pet-related products, owned by PetSmart. Peter Buckley, Manager of Software Automation at Chewy.com, used GitHub Actions to create a repeatable compliance workflow that keeps pull requests and commits in the correct format. The workflow reduces the number of errors in data formatting and catches issues before they become problems. In fact, Chewy no longer needs to attempt to host bots themselves and can rely on GitHub processing the actions.

LaunchDarkly: Automated feature management with a focus on product, not processing

“As we built this integration we realized that GitHub Actions are incredibly flexible. But they can be made even more flexible by using feature flags within workflows. Here, we’ve made an action that checks a feature flag every time we do a commit.” – Edith Harbaugh, LaunchDarkly CEO and Co-founder

LaunchDarkly is a feature flag management platform used to eliminate risk when deploying changes to production. Development teams use feature flags as a best practice to separate code deployments from feature releases.

Using GitHub Actions, LaunchDarkly automated adding pull request reviewers to the corresponding feature flags to allow them to test out new features automatically. When the feature flag is removed, a separate action finds all of the feature flag locations and notifies LaunchDarkly, simplifying its removal. With GitHub Actions, LaunchDarkly can focus on their core product and off-load some processing to GitHub—all to the benefit of their users.

Get started with GitHub Actions

We hope these examples spark your creativity—but we’re just scratching the surface of what GitHub Actions can do. Once you get started, you’ll be able to build, package, release, update, and deploy your project in any language—on GitHub or any external system—without having to run code yourself.